By Rudy Puryear Businesses that lead in the digital world can pivot within days, hours or even minutes as new threats and opportunities emerge. In contrast, laggards often fall victim to a technology function that need months, quarters or even years to adapt. By now, most large companies are using digital technologies to do things such as launch apps, build e-commerce solutions and harness data to learn more about their customers. But these “quick hit” efforts inevitably fall short of their goals when they must contend with legacy IT systems and data that can’t interface with new digital apps and architectures. Data is scattered across the company, rendering it useless. Outmoded and sluggish IT operating models slow the company down. The companies that take digital [...]

By Greg Caimi and Elizabeth Spaulding When J. Patrick Doyle took over as CEO of Domino’s Pizza in 2010, the company’s shares had been stuck at around $9 for three years. It was time to shake up the business. Change started with accepting a simple fact: A tasty pie would take Domino’s only so far without a seamless delivery experience. Domino’s would need to rapidly expand its technological know-how—and fast. To get there, the company increased its software and analytics staff, which now accounts for half of the 800 employees at the company’s headquarters. It set out to create a best-in-class mobile app that would allow users to order pizza with a simple text message or tweet and track their orders in real time. And [...]

By Chris Brahm, Richard Lichtenstein and Elizabeth Spaulding Among the many clichés born of Silicon Valley’s start-up culture, few are as misunderstood as the notion of “fail fast”—the idea that a company should simply offer a new product or feature to the market and see what happens. While the spirit of experimentation is right, poor test-and-learn execution has been known to hobble a company’s fortunes for years to come. But just like social networks and search portals, the fail fast concept has grown up. Rather than introducing new products willy-nilly, companies are using technology to collect vast amounts of customer feedback in less time, extracting the lessons and errors from their trials sooner. These powerful test-and-learn techniques are helping companies get to the best answers [...]

By Gary Clare and Prasad Narasimhan More companies are taking a clean-sheet approach to budgeting, scrutinizing every dollar of spending to ensure their spending supports strategic goals. Many are going further with a process we call zero-based redesign, in which companies revamp their operating models by analyzing which activities should be performed at what levels and at what frequency. However, in spite of this renewed interest in zero-based budgeting and redesign, few companies are tapping the full potential of a range of new technologies that could allow them to significantly redesign processes by removing work and cost. This oversight represents a significant missed opportunity for executives and the companies they lead, because these technologies support zero-based redesign in several important ways. • Costs and efficiency. Applying these [...]

By Jeff Melton, Andrew Rodd and John Reister Mobile network operators are struggling to keep up with the growing demands of their customers. People are live-streaming videos, playing multiplayer games and engaging in other activities that can overwhelm the network, making all services slow and unreliable. This is an untenable situation. Operators that fail to deliver a consistently superior customer-received usage experience (CRUX) are vulnerable to negative customer reviews and increased churn. Mobile operators are not just fighting for customers; they’re fighting for their futures. They’re struggling to generate sufficient cash flow to make the necessary capacity investments that will provide customers with the level of service they demand. And when they’re unable to make these desperately needed improvements, they often cut their rates to [...]

By Jordi Moncada and Vishy Padmanabhan A funny thing has happened on the way to the digital revolution. The process of getting there has turned out to be complex, risky and expensive. Nobody is arguing about the need to go digital. In today’s competitive marketplace, digital transformation has become a requirement, not an option. The problem is not the destination; it’s the journey. To become fully digital, enterprises have to dramatically increase the scope, scale and speed of their IT — all while staying in sync with the evolving needs of the business. To cope with these challenges, chief information officers (CIOs) are creating a new form of infrastructure — one that is complex, modular and hybrid. The new structure includes public clouds, private clouds [...]

By Jonathan Frick and Mark Kovac When deciding where to allocate their salesforce capacity, many business-to-business companies base their choices on current and historical spending by customer. Accounts spending more with the company usually get more sales resources. But to attain stronger sales growth, it’s critical to understand each customer’s total potential spending by the relevant product category. Estimates of a customer’s wallet size can be built through heuristic models based on public and internal data that predicts or is a proxy for spending levels. Such data includes the customer’s Standard Industrial Classification code and revenues, number of workers, or number of locations. One enterprise software company estimated the total potential spending of its accounts for each category of information technology it sold. The chart [...]

By Jamie Cleghorn and Mark Kovac In organizations that have separate product and service sales teams, the CEO and sales executives often assume these groups collaborate closely. That would be the logical way to grow sales and maximize the value of every customer. Yet at many firms, the two groups have evolved separately and operate with separate systems and processes, often with spotty collaboration. Executives at one technology provider heard from customers about disjointed sales approaches, despite reassurances from the sales staff that they went to market with one voice. The company decided to diagnose whether it had an organizational gap, using Microsoft’s Workplace Analytics software. The chart depicts the intensity of sales staff relationships, as represented by the amount of email traffic between individuals. [...]

By Chris Brahm, Lori Sherer, Richard Fleming and Briana Bennett Only five years ago, a World Economic Forumreport predicted that data would become its own kind of economic asset, able to hold value similar to gold or dollars. Ever since then, companies have been rushing to horde and harness their cut of the more than 23 zettabytes of data available—an amount that’s expected to nearly double by 2020, according to IDC. Among the 334 executives that Bain recently surveyed, more than two-thirds said that their companies were investing heavily in data and analytics. Not surprisingly, 40% expect to see “significantly positive” returns on their investments, with another 8% going as far as predicting “transformational” results. Their optimism isn’t unfounded—companies from UPS to USAA are mobilizing advanced analytics to great effect. [...]

By Justin Murphy and Mark Kovac For business-to-business (B2B) suppliers, it’s not always clear when to approach customers directly or when to use channel partners, as few customers buy exclusively direct or through partners. Most companies weighing this choice tend to focus on the relative cost of each channel, or when they will run out of operating expenses to serve directly. These approaches leave money on the table. It’s more effective to quantify the relative profit or lifetime value of customers in each channel, taking into account factors such as services attached, upsell and cross-sell rates and churn or renewal rates. To resolve the direct vs. indirect channel question, it helps to analyze solid financial data rather than rely on beliefs based on anecdotes. A [...]